


Five Things That Made Sirius Black Fall in Love with Remus Lupin

by professorcockblock



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 07:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/317326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/professorcockblock/pseuds/professorcockblock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then there is Remus. A static constant, a fixed point around which all things seem to bend, an unruffled impossibility of opaque calm in amongst a constantly waging war of sound.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have a Remus/Sirius blog where people sometimes ask me things, and sometimes those things accidentally turn into fanfiction entirely of their own volition. This was one of those times.

 

 **1\. Browns**.  
Remus is made of browns; the milky russet of tea-stained charms essays, rich auburns of melted Honeydukes, the worn down faded beige of yesteryears scars, those spotted and pocked off-whites of the hundred million books that he keeps stacked up in every recess of his life. Remus is built from browns and golds, born from the earth and wolf, bathed in dirt and the invisible rage of the woods. Sirius thinks that he himself must be the grey of stormclouds and scorn, and that to wrap himself up in the warmth of those colours, the sincerity of browns, might be to finally feel something other than monochromes in the tips of his fingers. To wrap himself up in Remus might be to break a world of grey and find a home in tarnished golds.

 **2\. Silence**.  
There is noise, always noise, always words, always thinking, a feeling that something has been missed, gone unsaid, a plot line he didn’t see, a joke he didn’t hear, always noise, always noise, _always_. And then there is Remus. A static constant, a fixed point around which all things seem to bend, an unruffled impossibility of opaque calm in amongst a constantly waging war of sound. When Sirius looks at him and he looks back, brow furrowed, slender fingers curling around the pages of a book, the smallest smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, it’s like everything else becomes background noise. And it’s terrifying. It’s like stepping out of a storm into becalmed waters, and he still doesn’t know which way leads to land and which to ruin, but without the pouring rain and battering winds there is nothing to shout at. There is just him and Remus and the sea. He always thought that love would be fireworks and serenades and shouting from rooftops, but with Remus’ skins against his skin, Remus’ space in his, all he can hear is the impossible rhythm pulsing blood through his veins and the steady hum of shared breath. From their place in Sirius’ metaphor in the middle of that endless ocean, Remus turns his head slightly to look sidelong at Sirius, one eye closed against the reflected sun. ‘Hello’, he says, and Sirius thinks that perhaps he is in love

 **3\. Words**.  
 _Cataclysm. Pustule. Keats._ Remus likes words _,_  uses them like they are old friends, smiles at them like they’re fond memories.  _Discombobulate. Unitard._   _Mollusc._ He feels out each vowel and consonant like a newly grown limb, each syllable an extension of himself. _Kiosk. Effervescent. Whippersnapper._ He folds and folds and refolds them, whispers them against skin. _Petrichor. Concatenation._   _Bollocks._  Sirius thinks that maybe one day Remus will run out of words, and will have to survive on sounds alone, eeeeee’s and ooooo’s and huuuuuhhh’s all over, overcome by a mess of alphabet. _Pickle. Dungbombs. Shakespeare._ He doesn’t suppose the words matter so much as the intent though anyway, and Remus intends every word, as though each meaning is ingrained in his bones. _Sirius. Padfoot. This._

 **4\. Marauders**.  
James reckons they’re family;  _brothers_ , he says. Peter says that they’re more like four blokes with dungbombs doing what blokes with dungbombs inevitably do; throw them at Slytherins. Sirius suspects that really it’s both. It’s the smell of mud in the dormitory and Filibuster's in the common room, it’s spontaneous pseudo violence and outrageously ostentatious flirting, it’s the possibility that they won’t get detention and the probability that they will, it’s an unwavering certainty that this is important, that they are important, that life is short and Slytherins are dickheads. Sirius and James clutch each other, howling with glee and their own cleverness, grabbing Peter and hauling him in by the head, laughing as though they might never stop, and really they never do. And when Sirius looks at Remus, scars lost in a face alight with friendship and happiness and possibility, he notices the flash in his eyes, the small swallow that acts as confirmation that this is who he is, that this is where he wants to be. Remus is a marauder, a friend, a best friend, and Sirius realises he might be home.

 __ **5\. Lies**.  
There is an incident with a goat in first year. Remus blames it on James, James blames it on Sirius, Sirius blames it on Peter, and in a fairly creative move on his part Peter blames it on Frank Longbottom. When McGonagall thunders into the common room, hair awry and smelling not entirely un-goat like, rounding upon James and Sirius as though she would like nothing more than to see them hung, drawn, crucio-ed and quartered, it is Remus who cuts her off before she can begin. Sirius is not quite sure what is more impressive; the perfectly executed falsehoods leaving the boy’s mouth (something about bezoars, the Forbidden Forest, and Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration), or the completely convincing façade of innocence that he manages to maintain.   
There is an incident with a broken plate in the summer of '81. Lily blames Sirius, Sirius blames James, James blames Remus, and in what is later deemed to be a sly move on his part Remus blames Harry. James and Remus are clearing it up as Sirius hears them in the kitchen speaking in hushed tones on his way back from the helping Lily put Harry to bed. James is asking if everything okay with Remus, with Sirius, with the two of them. Sirius pauses at the door, feeling something that is one part anger and nine parts fear and turns his knuckles white as he clenches the doorframe. _No_ , he thinks, _No, it’s not fucking okay_. ‘Yes’, Remus says, ‘Yeah, it’s all okay.’ He smiles and James smiles back, the tired face of a man with more to lose than he could ever hope to protect broken into an upward turn, a small victory against the war, and Sirius finds he can't begrudge Remus the deceit.  
Remus lies and Sirius loves him. Still. Always. Falling even now.


	2. Five Things That Made Remus Lupin Fall in Love with Sirius Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But then there is Sirius. Sirius, who breathes living into everything he does, who is the reason that seasons turn to gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a Remus/Sirius blog where people sometimes ask me things, and sometimes those things accidentally turn into fanfiction entirely of their own volition. This was one of those times.

**1\. Hands**.  
There are 27 bones in the human hand. Remus read that somewhere in a battered anatomy book he found in his attic when he was 9 years old. 27 bones. At the time that number seemed so huge, so absurd that something so small could be born from a number so large, but these days he doesn’t know how Sirius’ hands could possibly be reduced to any number at all. When Sirius stops, finally stops, when the safety net of his ceaseless conversation falls away, Remus discovers new worlds in those hands. They say more than Sirius ever does, telling stories as they skim across his neck, paragraphs as they trace the soft curve of a shoulder blade, every touch of his vertebrae becoming a chapter, flat palms pressed hard against his back revealing novels. Remus could lose himself in that narrative, _does_ lose himself in it. Sirius is always something and nothing, the very epitome of an oxymoron in every possible way, but with flesh and muscle and 27 subtle little bones spread against his skin, he knows that Sirius is real. That  _this_  is real.

  
 **2\. Faith**.   
It doesn’t take long for Remus to realise that with Sirius happiness is not always happiness. Yes is not always yes, no is not always no, and I mean it is not always something he means. It’s not quite insincerity, but rather the fallout from a brain that works at a thousand miles an hour, careering through a hundred uncertainties a minute, never quite landing or finding purchase anywhere stable enough to provide reliable conviction. It’s all long confident curves of unceasing conversation, low greying vowels between sharp vibratos, the absurdity of his words somehow finding a kind of legitimacy in woven tones of slate. Sincerity is never a certainty with Sirius, Remus knows this. He knows it the first time they kiss, the first time their skin meets between crumpled sheets, the first time Sirius looks him in the eyes and says that this is his forever. Remus knows that trusting him is falling, it’s stepping out into nothingness and believing that Sirius will be there to plummet with him, swearing, laughing and wonderful all the way.

  
 **3\. Life**.   
Sometimes Remus feels as though he is so stagnant, an inanimate lump lost in an overwhelming sea of magic and bright laughter. But then there is Sirius. Sirius, who breathes living into everything he does, who is the reason that seasons turn to gold and the sun gets up in the morning (he’s definitely the reason Remus gets up in morning, as apparently  _‘Fuck off, you bastard. It’s 7am, I will end you.’_  and _‘One more step and I will turn your manly bits into weeping pustules, Black,’_ stopped as effective deterrents somewhere around 2nd year). Sometimes Remus reaches out, lays slender fingers against his wrist, encircles the pale expanse there and feels the beat under Sirius' veins. It’s a song more than anything else, a steady rhythm unifying the peaks and valleys of timbre, the harmonies of Sirius and Padfoot and Black. It’s life in its most blinding and brilliant form. And that’s Sirius right there, really. Like being a corner of something bigger, better, bursting with so much energy and raw sensation. To be part of that, to be consumed by so much vitality makes Remus feel like a giant sometimes, and sometimes it makes him like the smallest and most insignificant thing in the universe. But it’s Sirius, it’s all Sirius; Sirius filling space in between space, and the gaps in between gaps, filling Remus up until there is nothing in the world but the two of them.

  
 **4\. Dogs**.   
The wolf doesn’t think in coherent thoughts, not thoughts that one could articulate, could explain with letters and words. It thinks in instinct, feels its way through the night, slave to the moon and ripped apart by stars. There is no space for humanity in this sea of bloodlust and unrelenting fury. There is just him; the wolf and the moon doomed to dance alone in vicious brutality forever. But something shifts, and all of a sudden they’re not alone at all. The night beats down upon others, tame but still somehow wild, seeking him out as if they are unafraid, as if they might all have been conceived from moonlight too, from the fractures in the darkness of the monthly verse.  As the stag leads the way, all antlers and magic, carrying upon its back the smallest, slightest friend, the dogs run together like this was what they were born to do. They spend whole nights, whole months, whole years, like that. Feral and raw, biting and howling up at the glittering night.

  
 **5\. Stars**.   
In the Canis Major constellation sits a star, the brightest star in the sky, burning 25 times brighter than the sun. The Sirius star. Of bloody course. Remus had never cared much for astronomy, a subject in which the movements of the moon were just movements of the moon, and not the earth shattering events he knew them to truly be. He did read a book about space once though, planets, orbits, galaxies and nebulae taking him away from his aching wounds and the sharp smell of Pomfrey’s impeccably kept ward. So he knows that in 1844 a German astronomer discovered that irregularities in the behaviour of Sirius were drawn from the fact that it was not, in fact, a single body at all, but rather the result of two separate celestial entities, forever orbiting each other but never quite united. And isn’t that just so bloody like him, Remus thinks, because Sirius really is a binary star. Everything about him is divided, everything comes with an edge, a side order of angry, wild, rough. He’s a dichotomy of self and blazing gasses, burning for a hundred million years with no signs of stopping. Sometimes Remus thinks that Sirius will burn him up too, will burn the heart right out of him, and he supposes that’s the price of giving himself away to the gravity of Sirius. He does so anyway, falling into orbit around his Dog Star, telling himself that that if they’re going to burn, then they had damn well better burn together.  
Years and lifetimes later Remus will look back on that and decide that, after all, maybe they did.


End file.
